filament

Recycling 3D printer filament isn’t a new idea, and in fact there are quite a few devices out there that will take chunks ABS, PLA, or just about any other thermoplastic and turn them into printer filament. The problem comes when someone mentions recycling plastic parts and turning them into filament ready to be used again. Plastics can only be recycled so many times, and there’s also the problem of grinding up your octopodes and companion cubes into something a filament extruder will accept.

The solution, it appears, is to freeze the plastic parts to be recycled before grinding them up. Chopping up plastic parts at room temperature imparts a lot of energy into the plastic before breaking. Freezing the parts to below their brittle transition temperature means the resulting chips will have clean cuts, something much more amenable to the mechanics of filament extruders.

The setup for this experiment consisted of cooling PLA plastic with liquid nitrogen and putting the frozen parts in a cheap, As Seen On TV blender. The resulting chips were smaller than the plastic pellets found in injection molding manufacturing plants, but will feed into the extruder well enough.

Liquid nitrogen might be overkill in this case; the goal is to cool the plastic down below its brittle transition temperature, which for most plastics is about -40° (420° R). Dry ice will do the job just as well, and is also available at most Walmarts.

Our friends at Freeside Atlanta have been keeping busy despite the city-stopping snowstorms they’ve been suffering recently. This time it’s a 3D printer with dual extrusion: the LATHON printer. [Nohtal] bought his first 3D printer only two years ago, but his experiences led him to build his own to overcome some of the issues he encountered with standard printers.

The LATHON keeps the bed stable and instead moves only the nozzles, using Bowden extrusion to reduce the weight on the moving parts. A key feature is the addition of a second nozzle, which usually limits the print area. The LATHON, however, maintains a 12″x9″x8″ build volume thanks to the Bowden extruders. [Nohtal] documents the majority of his build process on Freeside’s blog, including using a plastic from GE called Ultem 2300 for the print bed, and running the printer through its paces with a slew of materials: ABS, PLA, HIPS, Nylon, TPE, Wood, and Carbon Fiber. You can find more information on the Kickstarter page or at lathon.net

The latest addition to the line of 3D printer accessories is the FilaWinder, a tool for winding your filament neatly onto a spool. If you’ve abandoned buying your filament by the reel in favor of making your own from cheaper pellets—such as the Lyman Extruder, the Filabot Wee, or other alternatives, including the winder’s companion product, the FilaStruder—then you’ve likely had to roll everything up by hand, perhaps after it flopped around on the floor first.

The FilaWinder spools for you while the filament extrudes, using a sensor to adjust the winding the speed to match extrusion rates as well as running it through some PTFE tube to gently coil it as it moves along. Perhaps most important, the FilaWinder provides a guide arm to direct the filament back and forth across the reel as it spools up, to keep it evenly distributed. Swing by their Thingaverse page for a list of printable pieces and their assembly guide can be found here, as well as on YouTube. You can see an overview video of the FilaWinder winding away after the break.

The Hackaday Tip Line has been ringing with submissions about the Mark Forg3D printer, purportedly the, “world’s first 3D printer that can print carbon fiber.”

Right off the bat, we’re going to call that claim a baldfaced lie. Here’s a Kickstarter from a few months ago that put carbon fiber in PLA filament, making every desktop 3D printer one that can print in carbon fiber.

But perhaps there’s something more here. The Mark Forged site gives little in the way of technical details, but from what we can gather from their promo video, here’s what we have: it’s a very impressive-looking aluminum chassis with a build area of 12″x6.25″x6.25″. There are dual extruders, with (I think) one dedicated to PLA and Nylon, and another to the carbon and fiberglass filaments. Layer height is 0.1mm for the PLA and Nylon, 0.2mm for the composites. Connectivity is through Wifi, USB, or an SD card, with a “cloud based” control interface. Here are the full specs, but you’re not going to get much more than the previous few sentences.

As you would expect, the Wee has a PID temperature controller and is capable of extruding both ABS and PLA pellets into either 1.75mm or 3mm-diameter filament. Speed varies depending on materials and thickness, but can reach 5 to 20 inches per minute of filament extrusion. Though the Filabot gang is selling the extruder as a kit, you can probably save a few bucks if you have access to a laser cutter and some other basic materials.

You should expect to spend more for Filabot parts ($649) than you would for the original Lyman extruder, though perhaps a more fair comparison would be the new third version of the Lyman extruder, whose bill of materials approaches $900. Considering Lyman’s recent comments that indicate an extrusion rate of 40-50 inches per minute, the extra bucks may be worth it. You can check out a demonstration video of the Filabot Wee after the break.

[Rich Olson] really likes MakerWare and the Makerbot slicer – the software package that comes with every Makerbot – but sometimes he needs to change a few settings. Makerware doesn’t allow the user access to 90% of the setting for slicing and printing, so [Rich] did something about that. He came up with ProfTweak, a tool to change all the MakerWare slicing and printing parameters, giving him precise control over every print.

ProfTweak handles common settings changes such as turning the fan on or off, adjusting the filament diameter, changing feed rate options, and turning your infills into cats. It’s a handy GUI app that should work under Windows, OS X, and Linux, so if you’re running MakerWare right now, you can get up and running with this easily.

One thing [Rich] has been using his new software for is experimenting with alternative filaments. With his Makerbot, he’s able to print in nylon, the wood and stone PLAs, flex PLA, and PET. That’s a lot more material than what the Makerbot natively supports, so we have to give [Rich] some credit for that.

Needless to say, the World Maker Faire had a ton of 3D printers. It’s really becoming an obligatory fixture of any booth, whether you’re Microsoft announcing to the world Windows 8 now supports 3D printer drivers (don’t ask), or you just have a Makerbot Replicator on your table for some street cred.

Even the 3D Printing section of the faire wasn’t without a lot of what we’ve all seen before. Yes, the RepRap Morgan and Simpson made a showing, but 3D printing to most people attending the faire is just plastic trinkets, Minecraft figures, and single-thickness vases and jars.

Deep in the outskirts of the faire, right by the Porta Potties and a generator, one booth showed everyone how 3D printing should be done. It was AS220 Labs‘ table, and they’re doing their best to make 3D printers more than just printing out owl sculptures and plastic octopodes.